The Tribune

Suddenly there is renewed new interest in aragonite and a belief this natural resource could pay off the national debt. Bill Bardelmeier draws on history to urge caution.

SLIGHTLY before the beginning of the 20th century the great steel barons were rather ruthlessly creating an industry that would make steel available in huge quantities at reasonable cost offering excellent new avenues for economic growth.

Making steel required essentially three things: 1) iron ore from the earth’s scattered deposits; 2) coal of a particular type that when heated to drive off noxious gases would burn at a very high temperature (known as coke); 3) a large quantity of 1? inch lumps of pure limestone. Heated in huge furnaces molten iron could be drained off several times a day. The trick was to modify this iron which was durable but brittle and not malleable to become the much stronger more useful material called steel.

About 100 years ago steelmaking thrived using iron ores dug from the earth containing about 51 per cent iron.

By 1960 two of the world’s present major iron ore sources were still undiscovered. Australia had historically banned any export of its known small strategic supply of ore needed for national security only to awaken about 1960 and finding it held arguably the world’s biggest, richest supply of iron ore in a huge west coast geologic formation termed the Palbara.

A few years earlier and desperate for ways to increase production the steel industry sought a way to upgrade ore quality and useability. One could not simply scrape up powdery remnants of broken iron ore and throw it into a blast furnace for it would all blow away up the stack.

Europe with a large supply of very fine particled low grade ore developed a process known as sintering. Fine dusty ores mixed with crushed limestone were heated to high temperature sufficient to fuse the materials into pebble size lumps that could stay in a blast furnace. Production soared and efficiency shot upward because the limestone was already present to react as a flux for removing impurities in the iron.

Sintering looked like it had a great future in world-wide steelmaking.

and aragonite looked like a sure winner.

America’s biggest steelmaker quietly looked at those huge gleaming white banks of very pure Bahamian limestone precipitated from the sea in the fine form known as aragonite. Why spend time, money and energy crushing limestone; why not just mix aragonite in with cheap dusty iron ore fines in a sintering operation before throwing it all into a blast furnace?

Wow! What a future for aragonite!

Then some other steelmakers (largely in Japan) said why not just agglomerate high grade iron ore concentrates into rich marble size pellets? They did and production was even better than sintering for some.

Meanwhile huge new sources of iron ore were found and exploited. Whereas the world historically managed with the 52 per cent iron ore typical of that from America’s great Mesabi Range, Brazil and Australia now offered rich natural 63 peer cent iron ore.

The glowing steelmaking future of aragonite dimmed.

However, the giant cement producers in the Crescent Market of the US Gulf stretching from Tampa to Corpus Christi were suddenly keen for Bahamian aragonite. Limestone being the basic starting material for cement.

Why crush it at considerable cost when aragonite would be cheaper.

The future looked bright again.

Every U S Gulf cement plant needed limestone/aragonite. Ironically America had plenty of good cement making rock along its northeast coastal area but none along the mid America and Mississippi river south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Bahamian aragonite would easily supply the entire industry by tapping into the billions of tonnes stored in our remote regions far from the view of Bahamians or tourists.

Unexpectedly in 1973 the Arab mid-east threw the spanner into global oil economics. Mexico, with ample oil reserves in a market where cement kiln operators there were struggling with $130.tonne oil, opted to subsidize its cement industry with $28/ tonne fuel. The loud swishing sound that followed was the U S cement industry going down the drain and with it aragonite’s bright future again went dim.

The pickings are now much slimmer, but aragonite still holds a few market aces. Florida soil is slightly acidic. Citrus growers countered that problem in the past by spreading lime in the groves. Problem was, however, with any wind above a whisper the lime blew away. However, aragonite could be calcined in a furnace and it did not turn to dust, It had enough mass to stay on the ground where it was wanted. Not a big market, but a good niche market for a few hundred thousand tonnes per year. Trouble may loom as Brazil becomes a bigger orange juice producer than Florida and when entities like Cargill build stainless steel tankers just to haul orange juice.

(The writer predicted this in 1960 in a British shipping journal which probably drew numerous guffaws in London; What idiot would carry orange juice in a tanker?)

Glass container manufacturers in New Jersey find a modest quantity of aragonite very helpful to their glass production. Problem there is that the shift to plastic containers has been in full swing for some years.

Finally a long term market for aragonite as a neutralizer in the exhaust stacks of old polluting coal- fired electric plants held some hope. Problem is that everyone is keen to do away with coal-fired generating plants.

The marketing staff at Union Carbide, which preceded Dillingham’s investment in Ocean Cay, initially had other minor innovative plans for aragonite. They saw tiny markets at very high prices for aragonite in cosmetics; in chickens’ crops and bagged for filling the backyard sand boxes of New York/New Jersey children. Even at cosmetic material pricing nothing remotely approached the wild numbers being bandied about in recent news locally.

Thus it seems aragonite is destined to have many suitors, but the prospects for marriage to an industry are obscure. That probably suits the average Bahamian just fine. We may be broke, but “don’t go messing about with our sand.”

Bill Bardelmeier is a retired marine consultant who has lived in the Bahamas for over 50 years. He was a director of the Bahamas Maritime Authority for 16 years.